Nathan Rabin

Deconstructing Harry is a mess: a shambling, narcissistic, sexist romp that is, worst of all, almost entirely devoid of laughs.

Above all a masterpiece of sustained tone, a tightrope act that pays off in rich and unexpected ways.

The Hidden is a textbook example of how a B-movie can transcend its origins and budgetary constraints through craft, imagination, and all-around resourcefulness. Shifting genres almost as often as its villain changes bodies, it's at once an enormously effective thriller, a smart exercise in science fiction, an exciting action movie, and a kinetic dark comedy.

It's more consistently amusing and inspired than an adaptation of an '80s TV show has any right to be.

It's ultimately a tale of heroism in the face of fearsome, powerful opposition, but as stubborn pride masquerading as ideological purity proves Wilson's Achilles heel, the film's heroes reveal themselves as flawed to an almost fatal extent, and messily, fascinatingly human.

Bellocchio's film, which enlivens the grim realities of months in a stuffy apartment with striking bursts of lyricism, is often a powerful cautionary tale about the dangers of becoming a slave to ideology.

With Dad and his last writer-director effort, "Sleeping Dogs Lie," Goldthwait has accomplished the formidable feat of making wry, tender, fundamentally sweet comedies about the human condition that just happen to center on acts of autoerotic asphyxiation and bestiality, respectively. That isn't easy.

Superfly is in many ways classic pulp, but O'Neal and Mayfield push it toward a sort of epic grandeur.

A beautifully observed coming-of-age story.

The subject matter is unrelentingly sordid yet the storytelling is so deadpan and understated that it's difficult, if not impossible, to dismiss it as exploitation or sexist provocation.

The Yes Men's brilliant lies unlock explosive satirical truths, but the film runs out of steam a bit toward the end.

Afterglow gets off to a weak start—and it's occasionally hampered by stilted dialogue and cutesy conceits; Nolte's character is named Lucky Mann—but it is nevertheless a strong, frequently touching film that benefits from a pair of brilliant performances by Nolte and Christie.

Gyllenhaal and Peña's relationship, a sort of heterosexual love affair, is depicted with a sense of tenderness and care that does not extend to the cartoonish villains that dominate the film's lackluster final act.

Hopkins delivers such a warm, winning performance that it's hard not to be won over by his loopy charm and monomaniacal passion. The film is about a man whose need for speed takes on an existential and spiritual dimension, but it's precisely its rambling, meandering, unhurried affability that makes it such a low-key pleasure.

It’s about just about everything, so while the subject might seem niche it’s actually so broad and expansive the film strains to cover it properly in a trim 82 minutes.

During his clumsiest moments, Davis' fondness for provocation rises to the surface, which is unfortunate, since it weakens the impact of his many salient points about how American men are socialized to be warriors.

Surprisingly successful blend of goofy political farce and sober family drama.

As a featherweight trifle rooted in young death, an endless mourning process, and quasi-incestuous stirrings, the film suffers from jarring tonal shifts on a continual basis.

10 has the rare and wonderful quality of being simultaneously a perfect sociological document of the era that created it, and strangely timeless in its obsessions.

Holofcener possesses a genius for creating exquisitely realized characters who seem to have led full, rich, complicated lives before the film's first scene takes place, and will go on living complex, idiosyncratic existences long after they disappear from the screen. Of course, it doesn't hurt that she has four of the best actresses in Hollywood as the leads, especially Keener.

Carny feels like a throwback to the ’70s. It’s an evocative character study with a firm grasp on its subject matter that may be traced back to Robertson, an ex-carny who also produced and co-wrote the story.

The film loses some of its grimy verisimilitude toward the end, but it’s nevertheless a surprisingly effective low-budget shocker with a sensibility as current as the latest viral videos, yet rooted in the suggestive, less-is-more atmospherics of Val Lewton.

Beneath all The Double’s cynicism, misanthropy, intense stylization, and distance lies a core of genuine tragedy, and that’s what gives the film an emotional resonance beyond its aesthetic achievements.

Few actors are as riveting doing absolutely nothing, and The Place Beyond The Pines perfectly typecasts Gosling as a noir staple: the decent but rudderless drifter driven to violent and desperate action.

Minnelli and star Kirk Douglas give Vincent Van Gogh's famously tortured existence the melodramatic treatment in 1956's Lust For Life, and the result falls closer to high camp than high art.

Paris flits from story to story and character to character without doing justice to any of them.

Despite the abbreviated ending, No No: A Dockumentary is nevertheless a compelling, deeply moving, fun look at the highs and lows of a bygone era.

Alternately hypnotic and headache-inducing.

An initially engaging but ultimately wearying combination of naturalistic acting, cinéma vérité camerawork, and broadly melodramatic plotting.

Chris Morris' corrosive black comedy Four Lions explores the lighter side of jihad. It's a ballsy romp through one of the least lighthearted subjects imaginable.

In its own subdued, mellow way, Once is just about perfect.

Nichols succeeds in spinning an entertaining yarn, but the cautionary aspects feel fatally undernourished.

For neophyte cinephiles, A Decade Under The Influence should serve as a lively primer on a seminal film era, but its reverent tone is antithetical to the rule-breaking spirit it celebrates.

Forster's movie doesn't want to grow up, but it doesn't seem to understand childhood, either. For a film about the life-affirming power of imagination, Finding Neverland displays precious little of its own.

Kink sometimes feels like a promotional film not just for the website it empathetically chronicles, but also for the sex-positive ethos it embodies. But it’s also unexpectedly convincing, and at times even moving in its paradoxical conception of liberation through degradation, and empowerment through submission.

Don't let the film's highbrow cast, portentous tone, and leisurely pace fool you: Cleaner is just as empty and formulaic as his previous films, just much, much duller.

Well-intentioned and exceedingly nice, Watermarks aspires to warm the soul, but succeeds only in numbing the mind.

Skips right past depressing on its way to apocalyptic.

The emotions of soul music are irresistibly universal. The same is true of soul-music clichés. Based on a true story, The Sapphires tells the tale of four ambitious young Aboriginal girls from Australia who come of age performing before American serviceman in 1968 Vietnam. And yet the film is afflicted by a curious lack of cultural specificity.

With dialogue as spare as its harsh landscapes, the film is so tonally dry that it makes Aki Kaurismäki look like the Farrelly brothers--it begins at a snail's pace before speeding up to a turtle's drowsy crawl.

Though it grows silly and sentimental, Funeral scores enough big laughs to make its shortcomings eminently forgivable.

The film plays like a strenuous tug of war between the inhuman machinery of a wildly misguided plot and the low-key humanism of Melanie Lynskey's warm yet unsentimental performance.

A funny, boozy, ramshackle party.

Downfall's overstuffed melodrama juggles countless subplots and a small army of characters who manage to make an impression in spite of limited screen time.

Just like "Illegal Aliens," Addicted To Love is an exploitation movie, albeit one without even the science-fiction spoof's sunny, dumbass innocence.

By recounting Abbas' ordeal as an endless inarticulate monologue, The Prisoner reduces it to a dull anecdote--timely and relevant, perhaps, but an anecdote all the same.

Dolemite's plot has something to do with Moore squaring off against crooked cops and a crooked politician, but as in all of his movies, the story is less important than the cheap entertainment.

A voyeuristic look at voyeurs, Cinemania never seems sure whether it's a comedy or a tragedy. Instead, the film just seems intent on depicting its subjects as lovable kooks, a reductive portrayal that does little to acknowledge the desperation and loneliness that permeates every frame.

Carlos Cuaron's otherwise terrific new comedy Rudo Y Cursi barely survives its third-act "Goodfellas" descent into seedy coke-and-crime drama.

At best, it angrily demands to be rechristened This Is It! Too often, however, an incredulous This Is It? seems more apt.

The film boasts compelling performances--from Bruckner, and especially from Stephen Dillane as a wildly pragmatic money-man who radiates well-deserved cynicism. But Bloom is the giant void at the center of the film, and his laughable histrionics pull Haven firmly into camp territory.

Workingman's Death's primary pleasures are aesthetic. Glawogger is an extraordinarily elegant filmmaker with a photographer's eye for striking compositions.

Though The Eclipse travels a sleepy route to a shrug of anticlimax, it’s refreshing to see a film acknowledge that life and love don’t end at 50, even in the outsized shadow of a soulmate’s death.

Doesn't pretend to be objective, and the film derives much of its power from the way it invites audiences to look at the rapper's life and times through his own soulful, animated eyes. It doesn't always succeed, and there are times when it feels terribly strained.

Only when it wraps up all its loose ends with a feel-good sitcom conclusion does it finally reveal itself: It's an interesting failure rendered all the more disappointing for veering so close to success.

T3, while far from a classic, is an overachieving, mercenary sequel that's short on thrills, but surprisingly long on laughs and surprises.

As in the more successful "Land Of The Dead," Romero makes an admirable attempt to update his beloved franchise for contemporary audiences. But this time out, his heavy-handed intellectual concerns get in the way of a perfectly good fright flick.

In its superior first half, Yossi sustains a mood of wistful longing and inexorable loneliness as its directionless protagonist lumbers through a grey, joyless existence, but the film threatens to turn into a gay Israeli version of "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" once Knoller finds his impossibly gorgeous, persistent dream man.

Film doesn’t suit Alan Partridge as well as other media, but Coogan and company have nevertheless delivered a consistently lively satirical comedy that would stand on its own merits, even if it wasn’t weighed down by expectations more than 20 years in the making.

Kinnear's mesmerizing performance comes close to redeeming Auto Focus, suggesting depths the film never gets around to exposing, but Schrader's alternately flat and histrionic storytelling sends the film hurtling beyond redemption.

A repellent orgy of gratuitous violence and hackneyed melodrama, Deuces Wild marks a grim nadir for everyone involved, including late cinematographer John A. Alonzo (Chinatown, Harold & Maude), who deserved a much better swan song.

Boogie Man doesn't delve too deep into its subject's private life, beyond some cheap psychology positing his brother's horrible early death as the root of his winner-takes-all philosophy. But then, Atwater's work was his life.

There's a good chance that Judge's smartly lowbrow Idiocracy will be mistaken for what it's satirizing, but good satire always runs the risk -- of being misunderestimated.

This glossy musical, from "Hairspray" director Adam Shankman, is a shameless crowd-pleaser where cardboard characters use the most overplayed and ubiquitous hits of the 1980s to express the aching banality of their souls.

As befits a heartfelt ode to working-class values, Diggers puts in lots of hard, honest work that finally pays off in a wholly predictable yet unexpectedly moving conclusion.

Like the rest of the film, Beckham's climax is surprisingly satisfying, however, in large part because director Gurinder Chadha films the competing big game and big fat Indian wedding of Nagra's sister with equivalently bursting levels of color, panache, and verve.

Project provides an unmistakably one-sided view of rap as God's gift to the poor, angry, black, and young, but given the beating rap has taken in the press lately (please Oprah, don't hurt 'em!), the film's pro-rap cheerleading couldn't be more timely or necessary.

Parkland finds a new angle on an exhaustively chronicled and debated subject by focussing on the grim practicalities of the situation.

A film that's prescient and mind-bogglingly ill-conceived in roughly equal measures...Strange Days is the cinematic equivalent of trip-hop, a shadowy realm of atmosphere, mood and suggestion with a decidedly drugged-up, post-apocalyptic feel. But the many things Strange Days gets right are negated by the things it gets wrong.

While the characters, situations, and gags are all familiar, Shall We Dance?'s gentle humanity and quiet exuberance are contagious.

Forever Mine explores many of Schrader's pet themes—obsession, revenge, jealousy, betrayal, guilt—but they've seldom felt as empty, shallow, or ridiculous.

For all its florid pretensions and epic length, the film's overwrought take on its subject's not-so-rosy life leaves behind no lasting insight.

Though Hall's stunning vistas and gorgeous exploration of wide-open spaces hearken back to John Ford, Butch Cassidy otherwise radiates the youthful energy, manic pop playfulness, and antic clowning of the French New Wave.

Ice Cube serves as the film's solid moral center, with a dizzying variety of supporting characters in his orbit. A refreshingly class-conscious comedy-drama that refuses to talk down to its audience, Barbershop tackles serious issues.

Well-acted and artfully (though conventionally) made, The Way Back tells a compelling story, regardless of whether it's based on truth or a fabrication.

John Cassavetes’ films ostensibly explore what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real, but his conception of stark, unvarnished reality sometimes feels awfully artificial.

Throughout its first two acts, Bandslam is charming, sweet, and funny enough to merit inclusion in the upper echelon of teen comedies. Then comes a third act weighed down with arbitrary romantic conflicts, leaden melodrama, and a tiresome subplot.

For much of its duration, December is poignantly bittersweet, but the closing sugar rush washes its pleasing ambiguities away.

The story told by e-dreams is inherently compelling, full of dark humor drawn from a deep well of hubris and historical irony, but the film would be a lot sharper had the filmmakers not fallen under Park's charismatic cyber-spell.

Missouri Breaks begins as a ramshackle comedy and ends as a dour tragedy about the death of the old west with Brando serving as its singularly warped Angel of Death.

It takes more than just the ominous tread of Nazi boots to infuse gravitas into this well-intentioned but dreary look at the female mind and body during wartime.

Dealin’ With Idiots is at its strongest when it forgets about plot and character development altogether (which is most of the time) and gives itself over to the laid-back pleasure of improvisation among veteran professionals finding and exploring a good groove together.

Sometimes feels like an all-time classic short film stretched to feature length, but it’s blissfully short, and it peaks at the end with a groovy cartoon during the closing credits.

It's an emotionally chilly movie with a blank, inexpressive protagonist, but it gains cumulative force en route to a viscerally moving climax.

Instead of committing wholeheartedly to telling the story of a single family, Daniels gets distracted trying to tell the story of our nation’s complicated racial history.

Decomposition bears powerful, uncompromising witness to man's inhumanity to man, which is one of the most important things any documentary can do, though, it's also one of the most grueling.

Where "Crash" relentlessly pushed every conflict to a fever pitch, Elah takes its cues from Tommy Lee Jones' low-simmering lead performance.

Madden's dark, moody, complex exploration of guilt and identity taps into a rich vein of moral ambiguity, but the filmmakers should know that in the face of unspeakable Nazi evil, the romantic problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans.

If Barnes ultimately emerges as a heartless, duplicitous villain, he's nevertheless got the devil's slippery, seductive charm.

They're now the first major all-girl punk band to inspire a bleary, excessive, and altogether mediocre big-screen biography.

Madness lacks sympathetic characters and a well-structured plot, but its manic energy takes it far.

Regrettably, Bate uses many of the tools of tabloid television in making his case, including heavy-handed reenactments, an ominous, sinister score, and overly dramatic narration delivered in a voice shaking with outrage.

Unsubtle but gripping.

Rapper, producer, and mogul Tip "T.I." Harris was recently named "global creative consultant" for Rémy Martin cognac. Coincidentally or not, he's also the star and producer of Takers, a heist thriller that feels suspiciously like a feature-length commercial for expensive liquor.

In the wrong hands, or with a different cast, such quirky material could easily have devolved into a grotesque parade of cartoon freaks. But Almereyda finds exactly the right tone: a loopy, understated deadpan that invites empathy rather than ridicule. Twister has the outline of a broad comedy, but the inspired cast–particularly Amis–brings such conviction to its performances that the drama registers as strongly as the comedy.

In the wrenching final scene, the concept of "dying with dignity" becomes much more than just a catchphrase used to justify a controversial practice.

Unlike its subject, Amazing Grace won't change the world, but its quasi-religious sense of conviction proves rousing. Apted's unexpected crowd-pleaser is inspirational, but also surprisingly entertaining.

Ivory Tower asks a lot of provocative, important questions, but it’s decidedly short on answers, and even shorter on satisfying or convincing answers.